Advancing Clinical Research with the PINC AI™ Research and Innovation Collaborative

In today’s world, new therapies can take an average of 17 years and cost $2.5 billion before they reach patients. And when they do finally make it to market, real-world effects can differ significantly from outcomes of the trials. This is because clinical trial populations are often not representative of the populations affected by the disease being studied. As evidence, a new Northwestern Medicine review of U.S. clinical trials found women were underrepresented in several fields, including diseases accounting for the leading causes of death for women, oncology and cardiology. Similarly, Black Americans are severely underrepresented across the clinical trial spectrum.

These factors have huge implications for patients, providers and life science companies. PINC AI™ Innovation and Research Collaborative (PIRC) offers an opportunity to create a nimble health system network that accelerates timelines to provide innovative research solutions to enhance clinical performance and promote better, more equitable health outcomes.

Enter PINC AI™ Innovation and Research Collaborative (PIRC)

PIRC is a growing network, currently consisting of 20 plus research-ready health systems creating a peer-to-peer community that facilitates collaboration and rapidly implements innovation. PIRC taps into PINC AI™ Healthcare Data (PHD), consisting of more than 20 years’ worth of cost, quality and operational data gleaned from 45 percent of U.S. hospital discharges, as well as 812 million hospital outpatient and clinic encounters and 131 million physician office visits. It is a scalable and rapidly deployable model for clinical research that leverages a powerful national network, clinical technology and data expertise to enable faster identification of eligible sites and patients, compressed study timelines and increased speed to commercialization.

PIRC began three years ago when eight hospital system members came together at Premier’s Breakthroughs Conference with the common goal of collaborating in the research space. PIRC today consists of 20 hospital system members that care for people in more than 278 hospitals across 30 states spanning from eastern to western U.S. and representing a diverse population across age, geography, race, ethnicity and gender. The network will continue to expand in 2022 through the addition of more health systems including both community health systems and academic research centers with like-minded leadership. The health system representatives’ expertise ranges from healthcare specialties such as oncology, cardiology, molecular diagnostics and genomics to population health and regulatory affairs.

How is PIRC changing the future of research?

PIRC aims to optimize healthcare and its delivery through research and collaborative efforts. Using solutions and research powered by multi-dimensional data, they can quickly provide real-world evidence and insights that help advance clinical research.

"Collaborating with the PINC AI Innovation & Research Collaborative has helped improve our approach to clinical research,” said Juan Aragon, MD, Director of Business Development EvergreenHealth. “We have been able to tap into the expertise of the collaborative and multi-dimensional data to help us generate real-world evidence to support solutions and quickly deploy therapies to patient populations.”

PIRC is part of PINC AI™ Applied Sciences (PAS) and collaborates with health systems, pharmaceutical, diagnostic and medical device companies to:

• Generate real-world evidence that accelerates care alignment with evidence-based guidelines.
• Co-develop solutions with members.
• Conduct retrospective research, real-world evidence councils, prospective research and clinical trials.
• Publish research work in established, nationally recognized publications.

Accelerate Discovery with PIRC

Collaborating with PIRC can help partners accelerate discovery, development and deployment of therapies. PIRC combines the knowledge of health systems that manage more than 250 acute care facilities in urban and rural areas in more than 15 states covering all nine geographical regions of the U.S. PIRC members bring a wealth of experience and perspectives on research and clinical trial operations, innovation, information technology, data-analytics and business development.

PIRC focuses on four key areas:

Research

PAS and PIRC work with partners ranging from pharmaceutical and medical device companies to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Each of these organizations has leveraged the breadth and depth of the PINC AI™ data to help characterize illness and clinical outcomes, find better treatments, improve outcomes, and assess the impact on healthcare service delivery and quality.

Innovation

PIRC strives to test new ideas and new technologies to build sustainable solutions for the healthcare and research industries. It works to expand access to innovative technology to broaden health system members’ and research partners’ capabilities. For example, one technology tool leveraged by the PIRC combines natural language processing (NLP) with machine learning (ML) to understand, interpret and manipulate human language. In a typical clinical trial, staff must manually review charts to find patients who meet complex inclusion/exclusion (I/E) criteria. By applying an I/E criterion to electronic medical record data (EMR), the technology rapidly interprets large volumes of EMR data that would otherwise be inaccessible to investigators, thereby improving patient identification results by orders of magnitude over traditional approaches.

These tools assist partners through simplifying the research trial candidate identification process and providing comprehensive workflows built into clinicians’ processes.

Collaboration

PIRC is an ever-growing group of health system members that collaborate to improve offerings and health outcomes for their populations across the nation. By sharing ideas, innovations and even their own research studies with other members, PIRC can accelerate learning and implementation of best practices across the network.

Premier Partner

PAS cultivates strategic partnerships between life sciences companies and health systems to co-innovate solutions and strategies that transform healthcare. PIRC aims to help research teams decipher data into meaningful insights and arms researchers with diverse tools to help them address challenges and change the way healthcare is developed and delivered in our communities.

For more than 20 years, PAS has offered research and real-world data solutions to help members and partners launch or advance their efforts. Healthcare can be complex, inefficient and expensive, which is why PAS continues to work with industry leaders to help develop, teach, test and research care delivery practices through real-world interventions and prospective research and clinical trials.

Learn more about PINC AI Applied Sciences and PINC AI™ Healthcare Data. Find out more about how the PAS team harnesses the power of unstructured data and takes clinical trials to the next level with NLP.

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